Philosophy Tube|Steve Bannon or Why Do We Build the Wall?

What if I told you that after watching one YouTube video, I was compelled to read up on two very old absurdist plays, one about people turning into rhinos, another about a man who burns down his own home, both about fascism, as well as some articles about a 10,000 year old British skull, a discography about a play that takes the story of Orpheus and Eurydice into a Great Depression based setting, and an article about women who extoll the virtues of being traditional wives and mothers while subtextually trying to encourage women to be white supremacists?

If I made you say “what?,” then good, you read that and are just as dumbfounded as I at this knowledge, which isn’t the worst place to start.

If you said, “Sure, but that’s an average Tuesday for me,” then you and I are very much on the same wavelength, I like you, we should grab lunch sometime, and no doubt you already know this stuff from top to bottom. So carry on, sorry to bother you.

If anything you said included the word “cuck” then this is probably wasted on you anyway, so please, take the advice at the end of the paragraph before this one, and carry on. That is, unless, you enjoy a good challenge to one’s own beliefs, in which case buckle up, and try to save all cognitive dissonance until the end of the tour, please.

In fact, even to those who would be likely to agree with the particular slant of a piece of media like this, you may also want to buckle up. Throughout this video, for one, the man in question who made this piece, Oliver Thorn, will go out of his way not to call Steve Bannon a racist or a fascist. For another, believe it or not, he will actually point out the few points that Bannon actually gets right. I know, madness, right? What could a whacked out crank like Bannon get right? Well, more than you think, and it will make you uncomfortable to have to potentially agree with him, but that’s the point. This is meant to make you uneasy with the knowledge of just how simple it is to ingratiate people into more radical forms of belief, often enough by first finding common ground on one common, mostly bipartisan truth.

So, why am I talking about this? Well, I suppose for a few reasons. For one, I just love this channel, as well as this particular kind of YouTuber in general, and would like to show some really good content of theirs. For another, this is just really interesting, provocative content in general, and I love drawing controversy and thought out of people. Then there’s the fact that this piece has something that I love in any piece of media: a consistency between form, content, and theme. I am a big believer in the idea that form must match content must match theme in order to approach the reader in a way that stimulates them in all forms, whether through the technicals or the style. In the endeavor that the good Mr. Thorn wants to accomplish, he definitely hits every beat.

Right, you need to know what this video is about, no? In short, it’s a short film that is a video essay on Steve Bannon, what he has claimed, and how he does a very specific philosophical technique that has helped fuel a lot of his activities and the activities of many like him, combined with an adaptation of the play “The Arsonists” by Max Frisch. Interspersed with the analysis of everything from Bannon’s movie “Generation Zero,” to the reaction of certain alt-right figures on the race of the remains of “Cheddar Man,” are small scenes adapted from the play. “The Arsonists” is a play about a group of men who take up residence in a man’s attic and slowly, through persuasion, manipulation, and veiled threats, enlist the home owner’s help in burning down his own house, as said owner watches in a stunned mixture of horror and disbelief that such is even possible. ‘Why do it this way?,’ you might ask.

Well, this was the point I was talking about, form matching content matching theme. Throughout (and I don’t want to spoil, because this is actually very much worth watching, so I’ll be as vague as I can) we see how Bannon uses certain points that lend a certain amount of validation to what he says, which allow him to then start making greater and greater leaps in logic and reason to validate what he claims. This is then matched up against a few scenes detailing slow, subtle manipulation through use of certain valid points that begin to add up to larger and larger absurdities. See the point? This was also used by the channel Contra Points and its creator, Natalie Wynn, for her video “Debating the Alt-Right,” only in hers she used the play “Rhinoceros” by Eugene Ionesco, a production about a town suffering from a strange affliction where people are turning into rhinos, and boy will the way they make their transformations really make you think. It holds the same purpose, to juxtapose a type of content with a mood generated by the form the media, thus validating and reinforcing the theme. I would also recommend watching this piece as well, again, just for how beautifully it’s done.

Thorn’s video is also bookended by one of the most haunting picks for music one could think of, one most poignant in title and content, “Why We Build the Wall” by Anaïs Mitchell. This is a song off her concept album, “Hadestown,” an adaptation of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice as a folk opera in a Great Depression inspired post-apocalypse, later adapted into a stage play. The song is a work song that builds from one verse onto the next, detailing Hades’ indoctrination of his imprisoned workers, making them believe that their enslavement is their salvation. This is compounded by the visuals Thorn provides into a truly eerie, disturbing atmosphere. It’s Orwellian in its circularity, an exercise in true brainwashing. It also helps that the subject matter has a true ring to the current political climate. “We build the wall to keep us free.”

That’s only the beginning of the rabbit hole I delved into. I went deeper into the story of Cheddar Man, and all the controversy surrounding his skin designation, including the bigotry. It was fascinating to see the leaps of logic on both sides, the ideas that any slide on the color scale of Cheddar Man was either a racist slight or an anti-white conspiracy. I looked up Marcus Follin, aka “The Golden One,” a now famed white supremacist YouTuber whose work was partly talked about in this video. Is saw how he had interviewed one member of a movement known as ‘tradwives’ or traditional wives. At first, they seem to be simply a female centered conservative group who seek to take up the “traditional” roles of women in Western cultures past, but upon closer examination they’re specifically trying to advocate white women returning to this model, and more specifically giving birth to many white children. You start seeing why this was a topic he covered pretty fast. I tell you these things because, to conclude, I think this is what good content, content that holds enforcing powerful themes with a combo of material and form, should do. It should inspire you to want to learn more, to gain a broader perspective, even if it can be a bit uncomfortable. More importantly, this is how we combat the very thing that necessitated the creation of this video in the first place. We need to be informed, to be willing to look deeper, to broaden our minds. We can’t just allow ourselves to mindlessly react when someone says, “concerns have been raised.” We have to understand what those concerns are and who raised them.